At one point, she probably liked the idea of a daughter. When she was a girl, I bet she daydreamed of being a mother, of coddling, of licking her child like a milk-swelled cat. She has that voraciousness about children. She swoops in on them. Even I, in public, was a beloved child.
People judge. Fast.
I’d go out each morning and beg for six hours. I knew who to approach and for how long and exactly what to say. I was never ashamed. What I did was purely transactional: You made someone feel good and they gave you money.
And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be.
I suppose it’s not a compromise if only one of you considers it such, but that was what our compromises tended to look like.
Like a child, I picture opening her skull, unspooling her brain and sifting through it, trying to catch and pin down her thoughts.
Her mind was both wide and deep, and I got smarter being with her. And more considerate, and more active, and more alive, and almost electric, because for Amy, love was like drugs or booze or porn: There was no plateau. Each exposure needed to be more intense than the last to achieve the same result.
This is the hardest part: waiting for stupid people to figure things out.
If you couldn’t find something in thirty seconds, you were losing money, his father always said. Return phone calls immediately was another rule Clay had been taught to obey.
Desi rarely says jackfuck or shitbag; he says swine, which sounds more poisonous on his lips.
Nick grew up with a father who never ever apologized, so when Nick feels he has screwed up he goes on offense.
You are turning me into what I never have been and never wanted to be, a nag, because you are not living up to your end of a very basic contract. Don’t do that, it’s not okay to do.
We Got Llamas!” Odd words to see in neon.
I was a man of jagged risings.
I just want to live until I can’t anymore.
I was lying in bed thinking of killing myself, a hobby of mine.
It embarrassed me. Marrow-deep embarrassment, the kind that becomes part of your DNA, that changes you.
Amy knew that was what I had loved most about us back when I loved us: not the big moments, not the Romantic with capital-R moments, but our secret inside jokes.
You know how people sometimes say they have to hurt because if they don’t, they’re so numb they won’t feel anything?” “Mmm.” “What if it’s the opposite?” Amma whispered. “What if you hurt because it feels so good? Like you have a tingling, like someone left a switch on in your body. And nothing can turn the switch off except hurting? What does that mean?
It was kind of romantic. Catastrophically romantic.